Why People Still Starve

By Barry Bearak

Published: July 13, 2003

Late one afternoon, during the long melancholia of the hungry months, there was a burst of joyous delirium in Mkulumimba. Children began shouting the word ngumbi, announcing that winged termites were fluttering through the fields. These were not the bigger species of the insect, which can be fried in oil and sold as a delicacy for a good price. Instead, these were the smaller ones, far more wing than torso, which are eaten right away. Suddenly, most everyone was giddily chasing about; villagers were catching ngumbi with their fingers and tossing them onto their tongues, grateful for the unexpected gift of food afloat in the air.

Adilesi Faisoni was able to share in that happiness but not in the cavorting. For several years, old age had been catching up with her, until it had finally pulled even and then ahead. Her walk was unsteady now, her posture stooped, her eyesight dimmed. As the others ran about, she remained seated on the wet ground near the doorstep of her mud-brick hovel. It was the same place I always found her during my weeks in the villages of Malawi, weeks when I was examining the mechanisms of famine. ''There is no way to get used to hunger,'' Adilesi told me once. ''All the time something is moving in your stomach. You feel the emptiness. You feel your intestines moving. They are too empty, and they are searching for something to fill up on.''

Hunger was the main topic of our talks. Most every year, Malawi suffers a food shortage during the so-called hungry months, December through March, the single growing season in a predominantly rural nation. Corn is this country's mainstay, what people mainly grow and what people mainly eat, usually as nsima, a thick porridge. Ideally, the yield from one harvest lasts until the next. But even in good times the food supply is nearing its end while the next crop is still rising from the ground. Families often endure this hungry period on a single meal a day, sometimes nothing more than a foraged handful of greens. Last year's food crisis was the worst in living memory. Hundreds, and probably thousands, of Malawians succumbed to the scythe of a hunger-related death.

Among those who perished were Adilesi's husband, Robert Mkulumimba, and their grown daughter Mdati Robert, herself the mother of four young sons. The two died within a month of each other, unable to subsist on the pumpkin leaves and wild vegetables that had become the family's only nourishment. ''The first symptom was the swollen feet, and then the swelling started to move up his body,'' Adilesi said of her husband's illness.

It was strange the way Robert seemed to fade. Before the start of the hungry months, it had been he who had kept the family going, leaving before dawn each day to sell firewood or tend someone's fields. But then work became impossibly scarce, and Robert seemed to be using himself up in the search for it. ''At the peak of the crisis, there was nothing to do but beg, and you were begging from others who needed to beg.''

As most people visualize it, famine is a doleful spectacle, the aftershock of some calamity that has left thousands of the starving flocked together, emergency food kept from their mouths by the perils of war or the callousness of despots or the impassibility of washed-away roads. But more often, in the nether regions of the developing world, famine is both less obvious and more complicated. Even small jolts to the regular food supply can jar open the trapdoor between what is normal, which is chronic malnutrition, and what is exceptional, which is outright starvation. Hunger and disease then malignly feed off each other, leaving the invisible poor to die in invisible numbers.

Nowhere is this truer than in sub-Saharan Africa, where President Bush was recently scheduled to travel. Each year, most nations in the region grow poorer, hungrier and sicker. Their share of global trade and investment has been collapsing. Average per capita income is lower now than in the 1960's, with half the population surviving on less than 65 cents a day. It is a situation seldom noticed, as wars on poverty are neglected for wars more animate. African countries now hold the 27 lowest places on the human-development index -- a combined measure of health, literacy and income calculated by the United Nations. They occupy 38 spots in the bottom 50.

During the past decade or so, the poorest of Africa's poor have suffered as rarely before. Merely to survive, they have sold off their meager assets -- household goods and farm animals and the tin roofs of their homes. Just now, the most urgent need is in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Zimbabwe. But hunger has become a chronic problem throughout the region, often occurring even under the best of weather conditions. The World Food Program warns that nearly 40 million Africans are struggling against starvation, a ''scale of suffering'' that is ''unprecedented.'' Coincident with the hunger is H.I.V./AIDS, which has beset sub-Saharan Africa in a disproportionate way, cursing it with 29.4 million infections, nearly three-quarters of the world's caseload. Very few of the stricken can afford the drugs that forestall the virus's death work, and family after family is being purged of its breadwinning generations, leaving the very young and the very old to cope.